by Bethel College and available here
Junior Taylor Hight (pictured at right) got a chance not many do – to be in a major Hollywood movie with an Oscar-winning director.
The film was Killers of the Flower Moon, a fictionalized story based on a 2017 nonfiction book of the same title by David Grann. Martin Scorsese directed.
The movie focuses on a white businessman, William Hale, played by Robert de Niro, who claimed to be “a true friend” to the Osage Nation, while orchestrating murders of Osage people in order to get their lucrative oil rights.
Leonardo di Caprio also stars, as Ernest Burkhart, who marries an Osage woman (played by Lily Gladstone) and becomes complicit in Hale’s schemes.
Hight, who is from Skiatook, Okla., has Osage, Shawnee and Delaware heritage.
She and her mother, Christie Duty, her brother, Brandon Hight, and “my whole family – aunts, uncles, cousins,” were extras in the movie. When the casting directors came around, Hight’s relatives “knew who to talk to,” she said. “[The people making the movie] were trying to get as many Osage people as they could to be in it.”
